ECMI leadership

This section describes, discusses and analyses the organisation of the leadership of ECMI. It opens with a brief account of the structural organisation and work divisions of the ECMI management and goes on to analyse the management practice at ECMI, and this is supplemented with rec-ommendations.

As stipulated in the statutes of ECMI, the Board appoints a Director of ECMI with responsibility for the daily management of the Centre and the realisation of its mission. Today, ECMI’s

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agement is the responsibility of the Director and the Deputy Director, assisted by the Chief Finan-cial Officer.

The Director assumes a leading and overall role with responsibility for ECMI’s activities as a whole and delegates the carrying out of specified tasks to the Deputy Director and the Chief Financial Officer. While the Director is in an overall position with regard to the internal and external dimen-sions of ECMI’s activities, the Deputy Director assumes the immediate responsibility for the daily internal management, administration, supervision of research, action-oriented and publication activities, daily coaching of staff and general implementation. Parallel to this, the Director and Deputy Director in co-operation cover programming activities, as described in chapter 3.

Due to extensive external activity and travelling, the Director spends roughly 50 per cent of his working time at ECMI in Flensburg and another 50 per cent away from the Centre, whereas the Deputy Director is away approximately 30 per cent of the working time and in-house approxi-mately 70 per cent. The management of ECMI attends management meetings at fixed monthly intervals.

4.2.1 Leadership and management

Leadership should be given a high priority in an organisation like ECMI, and the ECMI leadership should also be visible on a daily basis and make efforts to ensure that the employees experience adequate job satisfaction. The Centre staff is not large and thus the basis for a goal-directed leadership effort exists.

In many respects, the division of tasks between Director and Deputy is quite relevant and worka-ble. The Director must by necessity assume a wide range of important external functions, e.g.

networking, fundraising and action-oriented projects. The panel acknowledges this division of la-bour and certainly appreciates the extent of the external activities of the Director.

Nevertheless, the panel recommends that the Director gives both management in general and the rethinking of its organisation a higher priority, which seems not to have been the case in the in-terim period since the 2001 evaluation, even though the panel acknowledges that e.g. research meetings and individual work plans have been introduced. The uncomfortably high staff-turnover at ECMI over the years in the interim period since 2001 could in the panel’s view partly reflect this lack of leadership focus, as described below. Of course, a higher priority to management ob-ligations must be a shared effort by both Director and Deputy Director.

The presence and leadership of the Director is of particular importance to the research staff at ECMI. Researchers do in many cases need a mentor and an academic role model to follow and support their work. Consequently, the Director should make his professionalism and knowledge

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more immediately available to his research staff. It is not realistic that the Director directly super-vises and mentors all members of the research staff even outside his area of expertise. But the Director should be regularly present at staff meetings in fixed intervals in order for the staff as a group to meet him and discuss items such as research initiatives, networking activities, co-operation with universities, fundraising or ongoing projects in general. In short, the Director should strengthen his role and visibility internally in an appropriate balance with his external obli-gations.

The panel also finds that the Deputy Director should – in co-operation with the Chief Financial Officer – maintain responsibility for the internal, administrative and day-to-day management and continue to be a visible daily leader, but to a certain and appropriate degree share the academic supervision with the Director.

The panel recommends:

The Director should give more priority to leadership in general and to rethinking the organisation of leadership. Furthermore, the Director should on a regular and ongoing basis make his profes-sionalism and knowledge more immediately available to the research staff through academic su-pervision and support.

4.2.2 Division of roles and responsibility

It is important in any research community big or small that individual researchers experience a certain degree of autonomy, independence and freedom of operation in their work and daily re-search activities. The panel believes this to be an essential requirement for good quality rere-search and essential for acceptable working conditions in general.

The panel acknowledges the fact that ECMI’s current Director is responsible for an outstanding development of the Centre and for the quality of the activities conducted since taking office in 2000. He has, as stated above, dealt remarkably well with these challenges.

There is, however, an unnecessarily asymmetric relationship between the Director and the re-search staff at ECMI. Network contacts and activities are predominantly those of the Director, and the Director is also responsible for quite a large part of the research output as far as scholarly articles, edited books and monographs with academic journals and foreign publishing houses are concerned.

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This asymmetry may have been relevant and necessary during the first years of the Director’s ac-tivities, in order to establish network contacts, a reputation, an academic focus, progression and so on. However, now is the time to disseminate and spread external activities and network con-tacts to the research staff members.

The fact that the Director has a high personal research output is impressive and should be posi-tively commented upon. However, it would be important to seek a balance in research output among all researchers at ECMI as this reflects the leadership time dedicated to coaching and mo-tivating junior and senior researchers and attending regular research meetings. Furthermore, the site visit indicated that the active researchers’ budgets for e.g. conference participation are not sufficient, and the leadership’s encouragement of the researchers to engage in external activity needs to be accompanied with the resources required.

The panel is aware that research output is dependent on the actual implementation of the re-search strategy and that rere-search output from the rere-search staff will increase correspondingly as the strategy is implemented. The panel feels confident that the present staff will cope with these added responsibilities and serve ECMI well by representing to a wider extent the Centre exter-nally.

The panel recommends:

The leadership of ECMI should ensure the research staff a higher degree of autonomy, independ-ence and operational freedom by introducing a more democratic and open leadership style and regular research meetings with the Director. The panel recommends further involvement of the research staff in the research activities (scholarly articles, edited books and monographs with aca-demic journals and foreign publishing) and external contacts in order to enhance further synergy and staff development.